Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

AI can do incredible things. So far, though, most of those things have been virtual. If you want a killer article for your bichon frise blog or an expertly crafted letter disputing a parking ticket you probably deserve, chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can deliver that. All those things are locked into the nebulous world of information, though. They’re helpful, but the products of today’s large language models (LLMs) and neural networks aren’t actually doing much of anything. AI’s silicon-bound status, however, is beginning to change. The tech is increasingly invading the real world. 2026 is the year that AI gets physical. And that shift has huge impl…

There’s no shortage of inspiration for what to do with a part of the house that’s not quite looking its best. Interior design magazines and furniture blogs are stuffed with idealized bedrooms, and online vision boards make it easy to cast a dragnet over the myriad images of classy lounges or perfectly ordered home offices. But there’s always the unavoidable catch that while these images may be helpful references for how to rethink a room, they don’t actually represent your room. A new AI tool offers a more personalized alternative. Created by the online interior design service Havenly, it’s an app-based AI design assistant that takes user-submitted images of rooms and…

Twenty-five years ago, Google unveiled Adwords, which pledged to enable advertisers “to quickly design a flexible program that best fits [their] online marketing goals and budget,” Google cofounder Larry Page said at the time. The principle was simple. AdWords allowed advertisers to purchase individualized, affordable keyword-based advertising that appears alongside search results used by hundreds of millions of people every day. That decision was a game changer for Google. Advertising now accounts for around three in every four dollars of revenue the company has made so far this year, growing 10% in the last year alone. The product, since renamed Google Ads, has …

The U.S. military was able “to strike a blistering 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran” thanks in part to its use of artificial intelligence, according to The Washington Post. The military has used Claude, the AI tool from Anthropic, combined with Palantir’s Maven system, for real-time targeting and target prioritization in support of combat operations in Iran and Venezuela. While Claude is only a few years old, the U.S. military’s ability to use it, or any other AI, did not emerge overnight. The effective use of automated systems depends on extensive infrastructure and skilled personnel. It is only thanks to many decades of investment and experi…

In the 1960s, IBM embarked on what Fortune called the $5 billion gamble. It was a bet-the-company investment on a scale nobody had seen before. The payoff was the legendary System/360 mainframes, which revolutionized computing and set the stage for two decades of IBM dominance. That $5 billion would be roughly the equivalent of $50 billion today, but even that princely sum is dwarfed by the $364 billion that tech giants are expected to invest in artificial intelligence this year. And the spending won’t stop there. McKinsey projects that building AI data centers alone could demand $5.2 trillion by 2030. Today, the AI investment boom is probably the single biggest f…

AI is changing how directors and cinematographers work—but not the way you might think When people think of artificial intelligence in Hollywood, they might picture deepfakes, synthetic actors, or AI-generated scripts and video. Google’s Veo3, along with other tools like Pika Labs and Kling AI, made headlines for their photorealistic AI generated video clips (as did OpenAI’s Sora 2 before the company in March announced plans to shutter it). But for freelance filmmakers, the real shift is happening behind the scenes. For years, cinematographers and directors have had to wear many hats: artist, technician, project manager, negotiator. Now, AI is quietly taking over…

It’s well known that artificial intelligence has driven skyrocketing demand for electrical power, computing hardware, and network connectivity at data centers. But AI has also quietly shifted how consumers use their home internet service. AT&T reports a recent boost in the share of data that customers upload through its network as they communicate with AI systems. “In 2025, customers’ upload traffic grew two times faster than download traffic,” says Jenifer Robertson, executive vice president and general manager for AT&T Mass Markets. “And that’s driven by AI use.” Historically, home internet use has centered on downloading data—accessing websites, scroll…

“We need someone who’s done this before.” Translation: we need someone who can absorb a strategic pivot, upskill personally for AI, manage a workforce whose skills and expectations are shifting, maintain execution velocity, and make faster and better decisions—with the same budget, the same headcount, and no additional runway. That’s not a job description. That’s a superhero spec. And the person most organizations reach for to fill it—the candidate with deep sector experience, the safe hire, the one who’s “done this before”—is often exactly wrong for what the role now requires. The logic behind the experience filter is not irrational. Sector knowledge comp…

In all the worthy discussions around the promise and peril of AI, we may be overlooking one of its most powerful use cases: solving urgent global health crises. Few problems illustrate this better than antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics underpin modern medicine, enabling procedures like C-sections and organ transplants and ensuring that patients can safely receive treatments such as chemotherapy. But the bacteria they target are constantly evolving. Over time, many have developed resistance to the drugs we rely on—turning once-routine infections into life-threatening conditions. The scale of the problem is staggering. A landmark global analysis published in The La…

For a while, the comforting narrative went like this: AI won’t take your job. But someone using AI will. So, all you had to do was to use AI, and even if you lost your job you could take someone else’s? The idea that you only needed to worry about AI secondhand—via another human—is in fact somewhat naive. AI is coming for your job directly. Not with fanfare or grand announcements, but through silent, pervasive creep: software agents booking meetings, writing reports, sending personalized emails, making decisions. There are even tools to send your digital clone to videoconference meetings, without people even noticing it’s not the real you—yes, an AI deepfake of your p…

For years, we have been outsourcing pieces of cognition so gradually that the shift barely registered. We outsourced memory to search engines after the well-known “Google effect” showed that when people expect information to remain accessible online, they are less likely to remember the information itself and more likely to remember where to find it. We outsourced navigation to GPS, even as research began to show that heavy reliance on it can weaken spatial memory when we have to find our own way. And we outsourced more and more of our social coordination to platforms that decide what we see, when we respond, and how we stay in sync with one another. Now we are begin…

For all the sketches, concepts, and slick imagery coming from the minds of designers in the car industry, the production cars that end up on roads around the world are shaped most significantly by aerodynamics. How smoothly a vehicle can cut through the air has major implications for its fuel efficiency, and in the era of electric vehicles, it can greatly offset the weight of a battery and increase the overall range. But the aerodynamic analyses car designers rely on are excruciatingly slow. “We’ll release a design surface, and then it can take days or weeks to get a full set of analysis back on the performance of that surface,” says Bryan Styles, director of desi…

Truly unlocking the value of AI is about more than new technology; it’s about leadership. Now that artificial intelligence is giving employees back hours of time every day, organizations must help their workers reimagine their roles beyond routine output and start contributing in ways that AI can’t. View the full article

AI use is becoming pervasive across the legal system, with both experienced staff and absolute novices turning to ChatGPT and other tools to try to make the most persuasive case possible when they arrive in court, even if some of those claims turn out to be literally too good to be true. Last month, top law firm Sullivan & Cromwell was forced to apologize for filing fictitious case names and fabricated quotes in a legal document submitted in a case, as well as citing incorrect statutes in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. “We deeply regret this occurred,” the firm wrote in an apologetic letter to the judge in a case about an alleged scam operation run out of Cambodia, whi…

Black Friday isn’t what it once was. Less than 15 years ago, it was fairly common for people to wake up at ridiculously early hours to drive to a store, where they would stand in line, waiting for the doors to open in order to grab the best deals. Those people still exist, but not in the numbers they used to, thanks to the convenience of online shopping (and the early start to holiday deals). But as artificial intelligence becomes more entrenched in people’s habits, it could have an increasingly large role in Black Friday (and Cyber Monday). And 2025 could be something of a test case for the technology. The average consumer is expected to spend $1,595 on holiday g…

The distance between a world-changing innovation and its funding often comes down to four minutes—the average time a human reviewer tends to spend on an initial grant application. In those four minutes, reviewers must assess alignment, eligibility, innovation potential, and team capacity, all while maintaining consistency across thousands of applications. It’s an impossible ask that leads to an impossible choice: either slow down and review fewer ideas or speed up and risk missing transformative ones. At MIT Solve, we’ve spent a year exploring a third option: teaching AI to handle the repetitive parts of review so humans can invest real time where judgment matters mos…

AI is becoming a big part of online commerce. Referral traffic to retailers on Black Friday from AI chatbots and search engines jumped 800% over the same period last year, according to Adobe, meaning a lot more people are now using AI to help them with buying decisions. But where does that leave review sites who, in years past, would have been the guide for many of those purchases? If there’s a category of media that’s most spooked by AI, it’s publishers who specialize in product recommendations, which have traditionally been reliant on search traffic. The nature of the content means it’s often purely informational, with most articles being designed to answer a questi…

The European Union’s law enforcement agency cautioned Tuesday that artificial intelligence is turbocharging organized crime that is eroding the foundations of societies across the 27-nation bloc as it becomes intertwined with state-sponsored destabilization campaigns. The grim warning came at the launch of the latest edition of a report on organized crime published every four years by Europol that is compiled using data from police across the EU and will help shape law enforcement policy in the bloc in coming years. “Cybercrime is evolving into a digital arms race targeting governments, businesses and individuals. AI-driven attacks are becoming more precise and de…

Like many people, I use AI for quick, practical tasks. But two recent interactions made me pay closer attention to how easily these systems slip into emotional validation. In both cases, the model praised, affirmed, and echoed back feelings that weren’t actually there. I uploaded photos of my living room for holiday decorating tips, including a close-up of the ceramic stockings my late mother hand painted. The model praised the stockings and thanked me for sharing something “so meaningful,” as if it understood the weight of them. A few days later, something similar happened at work. I finished a long run, came home with an idea, and dropped it into ChatGPT to pres…

As AI takes on a greater role in our media ecosystem, many journalists look at it like a farmer sees an invasive species: as a force that threatens to slowly choke, kill, and replace their work, potentially threatening their livelihood. There’s good reason for this: For reporters and editors, AI represents an assault on multiple fronts. Not only can large language models (LLMs) take over many tasks within journalistic work—research, writing, editing—AI systems also threaten to substitute media publications entirely. The more readers get their information from AI, the less reason they have to engage with publishers or journalists directly. Ask a journalist how it…

SpaceX owns 98% of global rocket launches, a monopoly with virtually no competition. Only China is competing with Elon Musk at this point in number of launches and, while the country is getting closer to mass-producing reusable rockets, it appears far from making that happen. The world needs to scramble. We can’t let a single company dominate the future of humanity—and much less one that is owned by Musk. “If you copy SpaceX, it’ll take you 10 years to get where they are today,” Lin Kayser, cofounder of Dubai-based engineering AI firm Leap 71, tells me in a video interview. “But in 10 years, SpaceX won’t be where they are today. The game will be over.” Startups and na…

Over the past year, a quiet shift has been unfolding across the internet. A growing wave of AI-generated news and content sites has flooded search results. Many of them are technically accurate, cleanly written, and structurally sound, yet they feel strangely interchangeable. A recent analysis by NewsGuard identified more than 1,000 AI-driven content farms producing articles at scale, often without original reporting, perspective, or voice. The information is there. But something essential is missing. It is not accuracy or clarity; it is a point of view. That absence points to a deeper question: If everyone is using the same models, trained on the same data, to generate i…

For a while now, we’ve been hearing warnings about AI eliminating jobs. First, it was only at the fringes. But now it’s starting to bite into roles once thought untouchable. It isn’t just administrative work, copywriting, or design anymore; even advisory roles, data analytics, and coding are being reshaped by automation. But history teaches us that technological disruption doesn’t eliminate work, it reshapes it. The industrial revolution, for example, didn’t end human contribution, it simply redefined the places where humans bring the most value. AI is doing the same thing today. While it does, in fact, take (or reduce the need for) some jobs, it can, and will, p…

With AI capabilities doubling in a matter of months, agility is no longer a competitive advantage for business leaders—it’s now become a survival skill. “The entire order of companies and the way in which they deliver value and the entire business models that they have been built on for the last few decades or longer are being rewritten in front of us,” Peter Smart, chief experience officer and managing partner of product design firm Fantasy, said during a discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “The new agility is coherence: Can you create the conditions by which it’s very clear what we do, what the value is that we produce, and how we’re going to get there?” …